Dixie State University got a significant bump in funding from Utah lawmakers this year as it deals with rapid enrollment growth and the need to prepare students to fill workplace shortages in the state.

The Legislature allocated more than $4.3 million to DSU — a 12.2 percent increase from last year.

DSU had the highest enrollment percentage increase among Utah's public universities for the second year in a row, the Utah System of Higher Education reported in fall 2017. Dixie State said its fall enrollment was a record 9,673 students — its biggest freshman class ever.

Plans to hire faculty, build programs

The Legislature earmarked almost $1.3 million of the $4 million-plus total to DSU to accommodate the influx of students. The university said funds will be used to create full-time faculty positions in general-education courses like English, biology, nutrition, geography and psychology in order to meet the large number of incoming freshman students.

DSU also plans to spend the money on updating classrooms with improved technology “to meet growing student demands and industry expectations,” it said in a news release.

With an eye toward providing students better opportunities to fill workforce shortages, legislators pegged $1.3 million for the school to build new programs in tech-specific fields such as mechanical engineering and computer science.

Additionally, the funding will support hiring faculty in the business hospitality and tourism field.

Nursing program to get boost

Students in the nursing program at Dixie State University. The Utah State Legislature appropriated more than $1.3 million to build new programs this year.(Photo: DSU)

A bulk of the funding will go toward the nursing program. The news release cited a growing nursing and health and wellness market in Southern Utah. The remainder of the program funding will support the new population-health, genetic-counseling, and recreation and sport-management programs.

Jyll Hall, director of public relations for the university, said the Bachelor of Science in population health was approved in July 2017 as an alternative for students who are interested in health-care administration or public health.

“The focus of this is looking at health outcomes of groups of communities and how these outcomes are distributed within these groups,” Hall said.

Faculty and staff compensation

To ensure faculty and staff members’ compensation packages are equitable and in line with the compensation for comparable positions across the state, $500,900 of the total allotment will go toward payroll.

"Some positions are further below equity than others, so those will get priority for funding," Hall said.

Hall said she could not specify which positions on campus currently fall into into that inequitable category because "quite a few" of them do. She also said no positions in specific departments are getting less; it's simply campus-wide.

Lawmakers earmarked slightly more than $1 million — a 2.5 percent increase — for faculty and staff base compensation, which is determined by a percentage all Utah System of Higher Education Institutions receive for this purpose.

Presidents and budget officers from each college/university in the state request funding from USHE each year, which then ensures all the institutions in Utah have a unified mission, Hall said.

USHE focused on funding three categories: student growth and capacity, completion and workforce.

A higher-education appropriation committee then prioritizes requests from the state's institutions and an executive appropriation committee drops the bill with the legislature to be voted on.